Review: The Garden Of Resurrection: Being The Love Story Of An Ugly Man

The Garden Of Resurrection: Being The Love Story Of An Ugly Man by E. Temple Thurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author is a poet, and it shows, though he's not so lyrical and fanciful as to exceed my (relatively low) tolerance. What I did find irritating was the characteristic early-20th-century assumption that women are a monolith, and men a completely different monolith; that they think and feel and act entirely unlike each other, in ways that can be generalized across the whole of each gender. From a 21st-century perspective, this is nonsense, and since there's so much of it, annoying nonsense. It's not, by the way, misogynist; the opposite, if anything.

The ugly man of the title, Bellairs, is disfigured from a childhood illness, presumably smallpox, which causes women to distrust him, but he is a deeply kind person when you get to know him. He narrates in the first person and as if keeping a diary, though it's not stated to be a diary (there are a lot of things that are implied clearly enough that we understand them, even though they're not said outright). He has no occupation, receiving 1500 pounds a year from his father, which is enough for him to live quietly in central London with a manservant to look after him and eat out at a nearby restaurant regularly. While at this restaurant, he overhears another patron talking about his fiancée, a woman for whom he has little feeling other than contempt and whom he has convinced to leave her home in the Caribbean to come and, eventually, marry him on account of the money she would bring with her. He has her lodged with his two maiden aunts in a village in Ireland, and they are, it is clear, busy repressing her and twisting her into something that will be more socially acceptable. She has some black ancestry, so they make her wear a veil on the rare occasions that they allow her out at all (both the man and the female friend he is talking to are out-and-out racists, in a way not unusual for the time; the narrator gives no indication of sharing in this prejudice except that he does remark, when he finally sees the woman in question, that she has no "racial coarseness" in her features).

Bellairs, overhearing this conversation, is incensed on behalf of the woman, and takes advantage of the fortunate coincidence that an old university friend lives in the same Irish village to take up his friend's long-offered hospitality and get on the spot, with the aim of cluing the woman in to what a loser her fiancé is and convincing her to go back to her home country and be happy as herself, instead of unhappy as an unsuccessful version of a British woman.

He takes his dog Dandy, of whom he's very fond, in part because dogs don't mind what you look like and won't ever judge you. He doesn't take his faithful manservant. His hosts, the old university friend and his wife, call each other by nicknames, which Bellairs adopts too; the man is Cruikshank and his wife Bellwattle. Cruikshank is a gardener, and Bellairs immerses himself in the beauty and joy of nature while attempting to fulfil his quest of speaking to the woman and warning her.

Things develop in both expected and unexpected ways, and there are some passages that I found moving and gripping as Bellairs deals with them. The ending, in particular, moved me, and it's this emotional power that lands it in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. It falls short of Platinum only because of the annoying gender stereotyping.

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